


after all the breath and the dirt

by magneticwave



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Inception, M/M, TW: Ableist Language, tw: Mentions of Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-14
Updated: 2014-01-14
Packaged: 2018-01-08 17:17:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,994
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1135335
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magneticwave/pseuds/magneticwave
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Truthfully, there are worse things a man could do after his death than haunt his husband.</p>
            </blockquote>





	after all the breath and the dirt

**Author's Note:**

> This is a ghost story heavily disguised as an _Inception_ AU.

i. raven

After the job in Singapore goes shit-faced, Raven calls an emergency planning committee meeting at Hank and Alex’s place in Brooklyn and ditches Charles at that atrocity of a coffee shop on the outskirts of Brighton Beach.

Hank is stirring a large pot of pasta as Raven bangs through his front door at quarter past six. “This is a disaster,” she tells the room at large, which consists of Hank, his back to the door as he manages dinner, Sean, zoned out and listening to his iPod on the sofa, and Alex, watering Hank’s neglected houseplants. The rosemary looks like the month-long jaunt to Singapore was the final straw; it’s pretty much dead, and Alex is only delaying the inevitable.

Because Raven dislikes being ignored, she kicks the door shut behind her and says, in a slightly louder voice, “ _How are we going to fix this disaster, children_?”

“I don’t know, Raven,” replies Alex in a monotone, drenching the spider plant by the radiator. The watering can is a cheap one, blue and plastic, probably from IKEA. For what is not the first and will not be the last time, Raven wonders if Hank has spent a single cent of the egregiously large sums of money they are paid per job.

Judging by the fact that Hank is wrestling the pasta into bowls with a slotted spoon shaped like Darth Vader’s head, it is probably unlikely. Correctly interpreting her expression, Alex explains, “It was on sale at Williams & Sonoma. He got matching cookie-cutters, too.”

Cooking implements at Williams & Sonoma are expensive—Raven knows this because she is twenty-five and all of her college friends have decided that they have to get married by August of this year or else they’re going to lose the life lottery and die sad and alone with fourteen cats—so Raven cuts Hank a moderate amount of slack. She then immediately takes it back when she sees that he is using jelly jars for glasses.

“Not that this isn’t adorably evocative of the seventies,” she says, badly hiding her distaste as Hank brings out bowls and glasses from the kitchen, “but I called this meeting for a reason.” She moves over to the couch and kicks Sean’s ankles until he peels open his eyes, blinks at her twice, and shifts like some sort of Mesozoic slime mold so he is only taking up one of the cushions. Raven flops into the open space, and then yanks his earbuds out.

Alex, returning the watering can to the kitchen, pinches Hank’s ass, and he squeaks and turns red. “Aren’t you two the cutest thing,” says Raven flatly. “Let’s get to business, boys.”

Although she says this with enough severity that even Sean takes a moment from being excessively chill to straighten his spine, she gets almost immediately distracted by Hank’s pasta because—“Are those _noodles shaped like lobsters_?”

“Yep!” says Hank, pushing his glasses up his nose and looking pleased. “I thought they’d help us brainstorm.”

“ _How_ ,” mutters Raven. “Hank, my brother’s dead husband _shot us in the head on a job_ , lobster-shaped pasta can only go so far.”

Between them, Sean has speared a lobster with his fork and is making it dance across the rim of his bowl. “They’re kinda cute,” he points out, before making fishy noises and driving the fork towards his mouth. Raven has trouble believing that this is her life, although Alex makes it a little easier by coming out of the kitchen and pouring what she hopes is half the bottle of vodka into her jelly jar of orange juice.

As she knocks back most of the glass, Hank says cheerfully, “I made cookies for dessert!”

~

Before Raven met someone who knew someone who knew Sean, their chemist was this total sleaze named Jonas who worked part-time in a tea shop in Chinatown because all of his pay went up his nose. Raven thinks about Jonas a lot—in not a very fond way—whenever she goes to pick Charles up from Brighton Beach and he is sitting in the Coffee Bear window, drinking something black and thick. The Coffee Bear smells like Jonas.

“I thought you would’ve called a cab,” chides Raven, sliding into the chair opposite Charles and giving the barista an icy stare. The barista, who looks like he was recently released from an underground prison in Yugoslavia where he was a heavyweight contender, grunts and begins to brew something toxic.

“You really ought to stop treating me like a child,” says Charles, smiling blandly at Raven over his cup. “I appreciate the concern, of course, but it isn’t necessary.”

Raven looks at her brother, who is thirty-four and filthy rich and is sitting in a coffee shop probably run by the Russian mob on a Sunday evening in one of his cardigans from Oxford, and she swallows a sigh. “Charles. Don’t be a moron.”

“I have a first from Oxford that would argue that I’m very smart,” says Charles. His usual charming bite is gone; it’s been gone for over a year, and he fills up the lack of banter with the nervous _click click click_ his wedding ring makes against the rim of his cup. The noise has become commonplace to Raven, like the cicadas in the summer, the radiators in the winter—a steady clicking that echoes through the emptiness of the manor.

The barista crosses the room in three giant steps and the black sludge is so viscous it doesn’t slosh over the rim as he slides the cup onto the table. “Spasibo,” murmurs Charles, eyes on the window. The barista gives Raven an evil eye, and she gives it back, along with a five and some nickels.

Even though this is the bad end of Brighton Beach, there are a few schoolchildren frolicking out on the street. If Raven lived here, she wouldn’t let her children out without an armed nanny accompanying them, but there’s probably a reason why she and Charles have always been immediately pegged as up-towners.

One of the children shouts something nasty-sounding in Russian and takes off her shoe to throw it at another. “Um, wow, okay,” says Raven, jerking back from the window. “Great. Have you finished your engine grease? We’re leaving.”

Charles drains the last of his coffee and stands, gently shaking out the tightness in his shoulders. He still has yet to make eye-contact with Raven; he seems absurdly interested in first the sheen of damp across the window panes, then a pockmark on the table, then the shortest of the children yelling outside.

They exit the Coffee Bear—not its real name, but its real name is something similar to the thought of a bear drinking coffee with fourteen consonants in Russian that only Erik could pronounce with some degree of proficiency—and head down the street towards the nicer part of Brighton Beach, with the book stores and art galleries. Raven immediately links her arm with Charles’ and concentrates on the cracks in the pavement, the smells that the breeze bring by her nose. It’s a trick she learned to center herself in the dreaming.

“This was the first place I built for Erik,” says Charles, king of the non sequitor. “It’s why he was teaching me Russian—none of the names of the shops meant anything, it was all gibberish and ‘the cat eats red’ and such.” He is staring a little dottily at the sign for a bookshop across the street, picturesque and with its wares spilling in wooden boxes onto the sidewalk.

Raven hasn’t lost anyone since Mummy died when she was seven, and Raven wasn’t incredibly emotionally attached to Mummy. She doesn’t know what it’s like to lose someone, but she does know that the full scope of Charles’ emotional damage is beyond her comprehension. One insomniac night in college, Raven had seen an infomercial for a machine that could scramble an egg inside of its shell. She thinks that this is Charles now—his exoskeleton of English eccentricity and organizational efficiency is still in place, but everything inside is scrambled up and a pale, frothy yellow.

“Come on,” she says, gripping his elbow tighter and guiding him across the street. “I’ll buy you a trashy Soviet romance novel.”

Dinner at Hank’s had ended at eight, and it’s almost nine now. The store has no discernable hours, or proprietor, or even easily accessible entrance to the store itself. Charles seems content to loiter by the boxes on the sidewalk, poking through hardcovers and laughing at some of the titles. Raven hates Charles’ post-Erik laughter; it makes him sound like a fifty-year-old college professor, laughing at some pop culture reference he doesn’t fully understand.

Post-Erik Charles makes Raven think in metaphors, because when she imagines Charles, as he is now, there is only a large empty space, shaped vaguely like a short British con man who used to get drunk and sing very silly Oxford rowing songs to his husband out on the patio of their mansion.

“Look at this one,” says Charles, waving a book under Raven’s nose. He immediately begins to bore her with a rambling story about Soviet-era book subterfuge, and Raven nods and hums occasionally in agreement, because he is her _brother_ and it’s been a year so she’s taking off (at least one of) the kid gloves.

Just—shit. Russian literature. It’s a fucking red flag.

“I’m starved,” she says, and as Charles points out, “Didn’t you just eat at Hank’s?” she ignores him and grabs the back of his coat and shrieks, “ _Pastries_!” and off they go, to get Russian pastries before the bakery closes. As they lick crumbling bits of crust off their fingers and make their way to her car, she makes up ridiculous shit about Hank and Alex’s stab at domestic bliss and Charles chuckles.

~

“I’m worried as fuck,” she tells Moira over the phone the next morning. Charles sleeps in on Saturdays, and she’s got the kitchen to herself until at least eleven, at which point he will stumble in, wearing a dressing gown and those hideous pinstripe pajamas she got him as a _joke_ from Marks  & Spencer on the Galbraith job.

“Raven,” says Moira slightly distractedly, “why are you calling me about this?” There is the sound of shuffling papers and the clack of Moira’s pen jar.

“Moira, are you _in the office_?” Raven can’t hide how scandalously shocked her voice becomes. “I realized you were taking this poorly, but it’s nine in the morning. On a _Saturday_.”

“Not all of us were born fabulously wealthy,” says Moira.

“Well, yeah,” says Raven, switching her cell to her other ear and reaching for the platter of bacon the housekeeper has left in the walk-in fridge. “I wasn’t. For example.”

“Yes, but you are now Raven Xavier and you went to Brown and left with no student debt and now you live in a mansion.” Moira must know that Raven is twenty seconds away from becoming a pissy, hissing kettle, because she backs off the money and heads in another direction. “Charles is not going to be okay, Raven—not for a long time.”

“Why does everyone keep _telling_ me that?” Raven mumbles around a mouthful of bacon. “It’s not like Erik went for a fucking picnic. I moved back into this mausoleum to make sure Charles brushes his teeth and actually eats dinner—I _know_ Eric is dead, and I know Charles is not going to be fucking okay.”

On the other side of the line, there is silence and the soft sounds of Moira’s breathing, evening out and synched with a heartbeat, _one, two, three, in_. “Raven,” says Moira, and then she pauses and spaced between her breaths are thoughts— _you need help_ — _do you need me to come_ —and quietly, _please don’t_ , but Moira is a big girl who doesn’t let the fact that she’s in love with Raven’s brother get her down and she rallies. “Working may not be a good idea right now.”

“No shit,” says Raven, letting everything unsaid fall into the static of the line and pretending like the top-notch liar that she is that Moira wants nothing more than to be her and Charles’ former colleague and reluctant friend. “Erik came down on us like a ton of bricks in Singapore. A ton of well-armed, nicely-dressed, James Bond-like bricks.”

“You can’t afford to let your reputation suffer any more than it already has,” Moira points out. “You might have to come work for us again, if that happens.”

“Oh god no, not black ops,” moans Raven. She switches her phone again and begins to halve oranges for the juice press. “Those were the bad years, Moira. You saw my hair. I was a nightmare—I had no idea what to do with myself. Did I go Jennifer Garner, did I go Halle Berry? I can’t deal with that sort of indecision at this point in my life.”

“Poor baby,” clucks Moira with zero sympathy. “When it comes to the security of this nation, I’m glad to know your hair comes first.”

Raven makes a face and then a ‘nyah’ sort of noise so that Moira gets the point. “I called an emergency meeting at Hank’s and tried to talk through some potential solutions. Charles and I may not need the money, and I know Hank and Alex are responsible enough to have some sort of safety net, but I worry about Sean starving.”

“Sean is a moron,” says Moira. “He eats his weight in ramen every week.”

Considering the alacrity with which Sean had mowed through Hank’s lobster pasta and then like twenty-five cookies the night before, she is probably right. “Sean is smart when it comes to illegal drugs and dumb when it comes to basically everything else, but that doesn’t mean he’s not my responsibility.”

That’s what Charles used to say, when tipsily arguing with Erik about morals over post-dinner chess: _our team is our responsibility, Erik. They are our family_.

“I’m going to refer anyone with an urgent problem to Steve’s team,” Raven continues, feeding the orange halves to the juicer. “I mean, Tony’s nuts but he’s a genius and while the last thing I want to do is feed customers directly into our competitor’s hands, we can’t function like this.”

“That’s probably the best decision you can make,” says Moira diplomatically. Less diplomatically, she points out, “You might need a new extractor. Angel’s been talking about switching out of government work—”

“Have a nice Saturday, Moira, give my love to the CIA,” says Raven quickly and she presses the ‘end call’ button with her juice-sticky fingers.

The juicer begins to make pained noises, and Raven hurriedly feeds it another orange half. This doesn’t seem to help, so she hits it with her palm twice, and then she groans and shuts the whole thing off, accepting the third of a glass of juice the effort has given her. Most of the electronics in the kitchen responded only to Erik’s loving touch; Raven is fairly certain the microwave has an active vendetta against her.

Her phone rings. She hums along, shakes her butt a little, and ignores it as she carries the platter of bacon out into the living room so she can check her email and brainstorm.

Two and a half hours later, she hears Charles’ footsteps on the main staircase, and the shuffling sound of his slippers as he cuts directly to the kitchen. “Raven!” his sleep-heavy voice calls, “Did you make tea?”

“Pot’s out here, Charles,” she yells back, and opens up _Cosmo_ online and clicks through three articles, settling on one that looks especially pink and useless. She’s reading it, expression only vaguely enraptured, when Charles stumbles in with a teacup in one hand, the other automatically groping for the teapot.

He pours himself a full cup, nicks a lemon from the tray, and then leans over her shoulder to see what she’s reading. “ _Cosmo_ ,” he says, voice thick with sleep and curiosity. “Odd Saturday morning reading for you.”

“How would you know? You’ve never seen me on a Saturday morning. It’s like lunchtime, you lazy lump.” She elbows him in the side, scrolls to the end of the article, laughs at the shitty punch line, and closes the window. “Magda left us stuff for lobster rolls, if you want.”

Charles is too busy having a religious experience with his tea to answer.

“God, you are so fucking English,” mumbles Raven. Louder, she continues, “I’m going shopping in Chinatown this afternoon. Singapore made me jealous and I want to find some hole-in-the-wall with silk dresses. I’m not going to insult your masculinity and ask you to come.”

Over the rim of his teacup, Charles’ eyes peel open and he blinks at her, twice. His hair is mussed up on one side, and he has creases from the pillow and sheets lining his cheek and down his neck. He is, as predicted, wearing the hideous pinstriped pajamas. He looks like a four-year-old.

“Oh god, you’re such a moron,” says Raven, and she pats him on the head as she tucks her laptop under her arm and goes to dig something properly hipster out of her closet. “We’re having lobster rolls before I go!” she throws over her shoulder. “And you’re going to have a whole one, if I have to push it down your throat.”

Charles adopts a shifty look, which is patently ridiculous when paired with his slippers. “Raven,” he begins, and she snarls at him from the stairs.

“ _You are eating, that is final_ ,” and that is (for the most part) that.

ii. charles

“Hello, Charles,” says Erik, tapping his toe against the wrought iron leg of his table. Behind him, someone laughs, a brief aborted sound, very French.

“Hullo, Erik,” says Charles. He’s been caught strolling down the street, baguette in its brown paper under his arm, and he pauses to observe where Erik is sitting. It’s a sidewalk café, the tables and chairs clumped like moss to the side of the building. The unevenness of the cobblestones digs into the soles of his feet. “Decided to leave the flat after all?”

“It is nice enough out,” replies Erik mildly. The statement is accompanied by a Gallic shrug—you almost wouldn’t know he was Polish, the way he acts about the French—and the hiss of his lighter as he pulls out a cigarette. “Join me?” he asks around the fag clutched between his lips.

“Yes, yes, of course,” Charles mumbles. He takes four quick steps and puts the baguette on the table, fumbling for it as it tries to tip over Erik’s coffee. “Um,” he says, and he can feel himself blush as he juggles the bread and the chair and himself. Eventually they all settle into place, for the most part. “It’s lovely here, isn’t it?” he asks, hating the inanity, as he makes a drinking gesture towards a bored-looking waitress in the doorframe to the café proper.

“She’s going to bring you coffee.” Erik sounds amused, like he usually is by Charles. “Whatever will you do?”

“Ask for tea. She’s French, not a dragon.” Having said this, however, Charles finds himself unable to correct the girl as she stomps out in her little black flats and slams a cup of thick, black coffee onto the table. He makes an aborted attempt to stop her with his schoolboy French, a hesitant, “Mademo—” but she’s already left.

“Very assertive of you, Charles.” Erik is smug, the daft git, and Charles makes a face at him and tries the coffee. It is sweet, almost unbearably so, and has the faintest hint of hazelnut. “The coffee is good,” Erik notes. “My favorite.”

This is where the training takes over. “Ah,” says Charles. He looks at the baguette. He doesn’t really want to, he can’t—but he tries to think about where he bought it.

“Surprisingly ruthless of you,” comments Erik, as the cobblestones begin to shake in the mortar. “Usually you let us have more time.”

“It’s been a year. Raven worries about me. I suspect she would call this ‘unhealthy behavior.’”

“You should have come with me.” The table makes a high-pitched whine, ceramic against iron, and their cups rattle in their fine French china saucers. Charles’ knuckles, where they grip the baguette, are almost as white as the porcelain.

“I couldn’t.” Charles is an idealist, but he’s not a martyr—too practical. There was always a flash or two of drama in Erik. The hotel room, done in tasteful whites and browns, the gun against the mahogany of the desk—it was all very operatic. It was a scene. Charles does poorly with expectations; unlike Erik, he does not thrive under imposed order.

The other patrons of the café have begun to notice; a baby begins to cry. “Charles,” says Erik, draining the last of his coffee, “one last thing. The Hegel.”

Charles takes the last few seconds of peace, before all the babies in Paris wake up and scream, to watch the long line of Erik’s neck as it disappears into the open collar of his shirt. He can see the faint purple outline of his teeth against Erik’s collarbone, the skin stretched golden and dappled. Erik wouldn’t know what to do with freckles; Charles has enough of them to spare for a small country’s use. “The Hegel?” he echoes, and then he sharpens. “Where did you stuff it this time?”

“The statue of armor on the second floor.” Completely unrepentant, Erik leans forward, bracing himself with his right arm against the table. It opens the gap in his collar even further, and Charles can smell his cologne, the cologne that still sits on their dresser next to Charles’ unfussy scent, over the acrid smoke. Behind him, Paris is burning from the earthquakes, and the Eiffel Tower fourteen blocks away is bending with hideous screeches. “I thought you would appreciate the irony.”

“Stop thinking Hegel is ironic,” says Charles, out of force of habit. “If you stopped hiding the damn book and actually read it—” The waitress screams, and a cab swerves to avoid a widening hole in the street and slams into the café’s seating area.

~

Charles wakes up.

~

He spends four minutes staring at the ceiling of his room, convincing himself that it was just a dream—not a waking dream, not an extracting dream, simply a very vivid, REM dream. He checks his inner elbow under the light from the bedside table; it’s clean, except for the small scab where Singapore is healing nicely.

“You weren’t even an operating facet of my subconscious,” he tells Erik’s pillow. “You were simply a normal dream.”

It takes twenty minutes. The fourth time he opens his eyes and the clock still says 1:37, he pulls himself out of bed, throws on his dressing gown, and stumbles down the main staircase to the second floor.

The suit of armor is in a nook outside of the library. It is a foot taller than Charles and probably twice his size in breadth. When Charles knocks against the breastplate, it gives a full, hollow ring.

“Raven is, regrettably, correct, I suppose,” he mumbles to himself. With surprise, he registers that he is wearing Erik’s dressing gown, not his own; he’d thought it packed away by Raven with the rest of Erik’s clothing, in the back of the closet.

Charles curls his fingers over the cuff of the dressing gown, and pulls off the helmet in one swift motion. Wedged inside, at the neck of the suit, is the Hegel (first edition, German).

“Oh,” says Charles, and drops the helmet on his foot.

He has told people, many times before, that the best way to deal with loss is to simply live through it, and accept the interruptions that the pain brings. He has used that phrase—“deal with loss”—fourteen times, most of which were during his and Raven’s tenure with Special Forces. In university, working on his second doctorate (psychology), he learned lots of ways to understand grief.

Despite this, Charles does not expect living and accepting interruptions to be easy. He likes being honest with himself; it feels like Erik is constantly with him, forcing him to acknowledge the petty and ugly parts of his personality. But living is very easy, with Magda to cook meals, Hank to run point, and Raven to make sure he eats the meals and forms plans that need a point man.

Extracting is easy. Perhaps this should be morally troublesome, but Charles’ code of ethics has long since been rewritten to include the barest bones of a morally acceptable extraction—do not kill, do not torture, do not leave without repairing what you can.

Erik, however, is not easy, because Erik will not leave.

~

“Actually,” says Raven, talking over Charles, “what I think is that you’re crazy.” She sits up in bed, grips Charles by both shoulders, and shakes him lightly. “Bro. You are having issues with the stages of grief, and you are skipping straight to fucking insane.”

Charles catches a noise in the back of his throat. “As the trained psychologist in the room, I should know—there is no such stage.”

Raven swallows a huffing noise into the back of her throat. “Charles, extraction does funny things to the subconscious. Erik’s in there,” here she taps his forehead with a nail painted virulently purple, “but he’s not _Erik_. He’s what you remember of Erik. Memories are okay, Charles.”

Charles makes a face. He knows the difference between memories and _Erik_. What Charles had thought about that afternoon, Erik’s shoulders as he cut through the blue water of the chlorinated pool in the east wing, was a memory. Singapore was _Erik_. This nightmare, the Hegel—that is _Erik_.

He doesn’t know how to voice this to Raven. “If I died,” he begins, and Raven blanches. “Not so soon,” he says with a slightly wan smile, pushing her in the shoulder, “but for a mental exercise: were I to die, would you remember my mannerisms, my speech?”

“Yes,” says Raven after a very long pause.

“If I went away on a very long vacation, you would do the same thing, wouldn’t you?” She nods, and shifts so Charles can slide to sit on the bed next to her. “But when I came back from vacation, some things would be different from your memories. You can’t remember every detail—I would do, say something that would differ from your mental picture of me.”

“Is this going to turn into one of those lengthy rambles on the evolution of the human psyche?” asks Raven. “Because if so, I’m going to turn down the light and, like, lie down and close my eyes.” Charles pinches her side.

“If you wouldn’t mind,” Charles continues primly, and Raven rolls her eyes. “Your memories cannot surprise you, Raven, because you are a master of them. You can remember instances where you were surprised, but you would not yourself be decomposed by them. When we were in Cambodia, with Moira, many years ago, and the projection of Cain appeared to you—did the things he say shock you? Did he tell you something you did not already know yourself?”

“No,” Raven says, mouth pinched tightly. She doesn’t like thinking about Cain, which is perfectly natural, as the only contexts in which Charles likes to think about Cain are those involving dismemberment. “He said—really, really shitty things, Charles. Shit I would never say to myself.”

“Cain could never tell you something you did not already know, Raven,” he reminds her. This feels like lecturing to Moira again, back when Charles was a very young PhD plucked from Oxford to train her in the mental gymnastics of extraction. “He could lie, but they would be lies already familiar to you. And those things that Cain said to you, before you shot him—they were familiar, were they not? But you had overcome them before, in your own mind during waking, and so you defeated them again in dreaming.”

Raven gives a little tilt of her head, accompanied by a shrug, to show that she registers Charles’ point but is unwilling to commit to it fully. She always uses it in response to being checked in a game of chess.

Taking that as the invitation to continue that it is, Charles points out, “But without outside influence, nothing would be completely new information. Raven, I hadn’t the faintest idea where the Hegel was. A few years ago, Erik snatched it from my study and hid it away in the storage cupboard in the billiard room and I found it three months or so later and returned it to the library. I haven’t even looked for it since. How did I know that Erik had hidden it again, or that it would be in the suit of armor?”

Because he knows what her first question will be, Charles rolls up the sleeves of his— _Erik’s_ —dressing down and shows Raven the inside of both of his elbows. “Now that I know, of course Erik had gotten bored and hidden the damn Hegel again, but if you’d asked me yesterday I would have told you it was in the library. Because, as far as I knew, it _was_. And if you’d told me it was missing, the first place I would have thought to look most certainly would not have been the suit of armor on the second bloody floor.”

Raven lightly rests her fingertips on Charles’ wrists. “Charles,” she says quietly, “it’s okay. Stop, shh.” There’s a fine trembling in Charles’ hands, he sees now, and Raven steadies his knuckles against her folded knees. “So something weird happened, I get it. We haven’t really had normal dreams since we started doing this, and Erik coming down on us in Singapore was really fucking disturbing. But, babe—”

“Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth,” Charles says in a rush.

“Are you quoting _Spock_?” Raven squawks.

“I’m quoting Sherlock Holmes, you uncultured thing,” Charles replies, responding to her stuck-out tongue with a scrunched nose. “What if the Erik we have been seeing—I have been seeing—is not a projection?”

Raven asks, “Am I being you in this reenactment of our first year in SpecOps? _No, Moira, the projections are not real individuals. Else we would likely not have called them ‘projections of the unconscious.’ They are tendrils of your own mind, and to see them as accurate representations of the people whose faces they bear would be a grave and perhaps deadly error_.” Her impression of Charles is uncanny.

“A projection can tell you where you left your other argyle sock,” Charles says, determined now to carry this thought experiment out until the bitter end. He can’t even tell if he wants Raven to prove him wrong or to believe him; he simply wants them both to exist in agreement. “It cannot tell you where your husband left a book you didn’t know was missing.”

Being familiar with Charles’ need to talk through logical dilemmas, Raven sighs and taps her right index finger against the palm of Charles’ hand. “Okay,” she says. “Our options here are, one, that because your projections are the product of your genius-level intellect, they are capable of interpreting subconscious stimuli and producing scarily accurate inferences. Two, someone’s managed the fucking impossible and incepted you. Three—you’re sleepwalking, I guess? That could be a thing. Four—” Here she pauses, and her face sours.

“Four,” Charles says grimly, the shaking returning to his hands, “Erik is not dead.”

“Oh, he’s definitely dead,” Raven corrects. “I’m never going to forget having to identify his body with the”—she gestures in a vague circle around her forehead—“bullet hole. We have a lot of competitors and enemies in this business, you better believe I walked his body through every step before he was buried. You’re just saying that his mind is still alive, somehow. Making contact with yours.”

“Yes,” Charles agrees. His breathing is remarkably shallow, perhaps because his chest aches when he draws in breaths that are too deep. Erik has not worn this dressing gown since he died, a year ago, and it would be infantile to draw on sensory details that aren’t there—it doesn’t smell like him, it lacks the warmth that would have been imparted by his body—but Charles still feels a kind of ghostly comfort draped over him, because he is wearing it.

“To recap,” Raven says, presumably because it brings her joy to be difficult, “you’re saying that you think you’re being haunted. In dream-space. By Erik. By an actual entity that is Erik, separate from yourself.”

She makes it sound ridiculous, of course, because it _is_ ridiculous. Charles has used the mind often enough to know how dangerous a weapon it can be against its possessor, but he feels the certainty deep—in his bones, in his soul, in the places that have felt empty and barren since Erik died.

“Yes,” Charles says. “I suppose we may call it a haunting.”

Raven’s fingers tighten on his wrist. “For _fuck’s_ sake,” she finally bites out. “You couldn’t have had a fucking normal marriage. Christ.”

iii. hank

The call from Raven comes at three in the morning, which brings back uncomfortable flashes for Hank of Special Ops. Of course, back when they were part of the CIA, Hank didn’t know Alex—there would have been no chance, then, of Hank waking up to one of Raven’s rude early morning phone calls and having to desperately fight the urge to ignore his phone and curl back into Alex’s warm side.

“What the fuck,” Alex moans roughly when Hank’s phone begins to chirp. He has all of the pillows, while Hank has most of the duvet and flat sheet; when the phone goes off again, managing to sound more irritated about it, Alex grabs the last pillow, which is half-wedged under Hank’s head, and pulls it over his ear.

The adrenaline has already gotten to Hank by then. Raven had rarely called in the middle of the night during their time in Special Ops because she was bored. She called when there was a problem; when she was bored, Hank would wake up to find that she’d changed the height of every lab stool to be slightly too short or rearranged his MSDS binders out of alphabetical order.

“Hey?” Hank says groggily when he answers. Alex groans and kicks him, which barely makes an impact through the layers of duvet in which Hank has swaddled himself.

“Hey,” Raven says briskly. She sounds as though she’s been up for hours. Hank hadn’t seen much of Raven while she was at Brown, but he imagines she sounded a lot like this on the tail end of an all-nighter. “You and the Beast up for a field trip?”

“Tell her no,” Alex groans under his mound of pillows. “Whatever it is, the answer is _no_.”

Hank equivocates, “What kind of field trip?”

“The kind of field trip that’s not fucking optional,” Raven replies brutally. “Get your boyfriend’s lazy ass out of bed and get over to the house. Pick up Sean, he’s not answering his phone.”

“Probably because it’s three in the morning,” Hank points out. He gropes for his glasses and nearly sends them to the floor, along with the five books precariously stacked on one corner of his bedside table. Maybe Alex has a point when he complains about how Hank’s books are asexually reproducing when they aren’t home.

“Pft,” Raven says, “Sean could sleep through a fucking earthquake. I think he _did_ , when we were in Japan a few years ago.”

“Yeah,” Hank allows reluctantly. “We’ll pick Sean up on our way. Do you need us to bring anything?” He can’t imagine there’s anything at the manor that they’re lacking, but he was raised to be polite.

“Your butt,” Raven replies, and then she hangs up.

When Hank tells people that Raven is his best friend, he always experiences a brief moment of incredulity that this is his life and these are the people he’s chosen to populate it. To be fair, Hank hadn’t had much of a choice—he’d been in and out of MIT by seventeen, interned with a few research subdivisions of the NSA before he’d been poached by the CIA at age nineteen for Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr’s ambitious and hugely secret extracting experimentation, and nowhere in there had he had time to build any kind of strong relationship. Raven is fully capable of overwhelming whomever she can’t seduce with her debilitating charm; she’d been Hank’s best friend before he’d been with Charles for a week.

“Babe,” Hank mumbles, leaning over and resting his forehead against the mound of pillows burying Alex’s upper body. “We’ve got to get to the manor.”

“It’s the middle of the fucking night,” Alex mumbles. “Unless everybody’s on fire, I don’t care.”

“Fire might be involved,” Hank points out, nudging the pillows out of the way so he can press a kiss to Alex’s left shoulder blade. “Raven didn’t specify.”

“Nnngh,” Alex groans.

“Come on,” Hank says, and then he sinks his teeth into Alex’s shoulder for bite that’s a hair too strong for it to be anything but sexy. “I’ll blow you in the shower.”

“Fuck you,” Alex says, voice muffled, but he gets out of bed.

~

“What happened to the plan?” Hank whispers to Raven in an undertone, once Charles has finished explaining about his book and the suit of armor and gone off with Alex to check the security feed to make sure no one’s broken into the manor recently.

“What plan?” Raven says distractedly. She’s pulling up the files on the last three jobs they’d done before Erik’s death, ostensibly to look for patterns. Charles is obviously hoping that they find some sort of indication of Erik laying groundwork for what has happened, but Hank has his doubts about how useful going through their files will be. He also personally wants to relive the fucking mess of the Peabody job sometime around never and he wasn’t even stuck in Limbo like Charles and Eric for that one.

“The _helping Charles move on_ plan,” Hank replies. “You know, the one we came up with a few days ago? We ate pasta and you drank half a bottle of Svedka?”

Raven looks up from her computer to give Hank an incredibly unimpressed look. “Yes, I remember the plan,” she says, like she didn’t just give Hank a clear indication that she had no idea what he was talking about. “Now it’s changed. Now it’s the _helping Charles to move on by proving his brain isn’t being haunted_ plan.”

As she looks back down at her computer screen and exhales in a long huff, Hank points out, “Do we—know that?”

“What?” Raven says, popping back up over the back of her laptop to give Hank a very angry look. “Don’t go white guy in Philosophy 101 on me here, Hank. Erik is _dead_.”

Raven’s glares are terrifying, and have been to Hank for the last seven years, but Hank, to be completely honest, isn’t sure that Charles is wrong. “We don’t know, though? Do we? What this many years of extracting can do? Erik and Charles were always—the best, at this. Nobody could build like Erik could. That’s still true. Alex does okay enough for our jobs and Tony’s pretty amazing, but Erik was the first architect and he’s still the best.”

“Oh my _god_ ,” Raven says, throwing her hands in the air. “Seriously, you too? I can’t fucking believe this. Ghosts aren’t real, Hank! Dead people are dead! I had to go into that fucking hotel room and identify my brother-in-law because there was a bullet in his forehead and half of the back of his head was gone, okay? I was the _only_ one there, and the rest of you seem really willing to just forget that that ever happened.”

“Erik is dead, yeah,” Hank allows, since Raven never talks about what happened last year and she doesn’t look like she wants to now. “I promise, I’m not arguing with you about that. But he and Charles went in and out of each other’s brains all the time. Even in the beginning, when we had that really terrible SpecOps chemist that Moira hated and everybody came out of the dreaming with migraines and nosebleeds, Erik and Charles were insanely compatible. Just because we looked at a couple MRIs and said it was safe doesn’t mean we were right about that. Maybe Erik left something behind.”

“What, like his consciousness?” Raven scoffs and goes back to her computer, typing loudly to show Hank that he’s less important than the work she’s doing. “Waking up collapses the dream. For fuck’s sake, Hank, you should know the limitations of this. You helped invent it.”

It’s lucky that Raven is Hank’s best friend, because anybody else would have given up by now. Hank can tell what she’s trying to hide, though—Raven is terrified. If he were to go over and look at her fingers angrily clacking away on the keyboard of her laptop, Hank would be willing to bet at least a third of his retirement fund that her hands are shaking. Hank is scared, too.

“I helped invent it,” Hank agrees quietly, “but it’s bigger than our lab, now. People are doing things with it we wouldn’t have been able to imagine. Did you hear that Steve’s team might have performed a successful inception?”

“We all heard about that,” Raven says dismissively. “Tony and Bruce won’t shut up about it. They’re good, but I have my doubts about an actual fucking inception.”

“Inception was always a theoretical concept,” Hank continues. “But five years ago, multilayered dreaming was also a theoretical concept. Now two or three are standard for difficult jobs. Do you see what I’m saying here, Raven? There’s no way for us to know. Maybe Erik _is_ there.”

Her typing slows, at least, and becomes quieter. “Doing what?” Raven asks. “Meeting Charles at cute cafes? Catching up on old friends? Did you catch what Charles said, about the dream collapsing? Real dreams shouldn’t do that.”

Hank looks down at his shoes, his fingers going to the hem of the sweater he’d thrown on an hour ago on his way out the door, and asks, “Do you still get real dreams?” Hank can’t remember the last time he had a dream that he could recall upon waking. Alex hadn’t either, for the longest time, but once Erik had taken him on as an apprentice they’d started up again.

Raven’s shoulders twitch in a half-shrug. “Rarely,” she admits. “They’re always fucking weird—life-sized rabbits and rooms with doors looping back onto themselves and stuff. Nothing structured, not for years.”

The hem of the cable knit sweater is rough under Hank’s fingers. He thinks it might be Alex’s, now that he’s looking at it instead of Raven. Alex is shorter than Hank, more compact, his shoulders narrower but more tightly packed with muscle. It’s true that Hank misses normal dreams and having a normal job that was likely to reroute him back to academia and some kind of faculty position at his alma mater, but without extracting Hank wouldn’t have Alex and his sweaters and his stupid hair.

“What about it being an inception?” Hank finally asks.

Raven snorts loudly. “Yeah, I brought up that possibility. It’d be an _amazing_ job, if it were. Steve’s team wouldn’t take the money to do something like that. Steve’s too ethical and Clint likes us too much. Shaw would do it, in a heartbeat, and probably even at reduced cost, but I’ve been keeping tabs on him and he hasn’t been out of Hong Kong in months.”

Hank runs a fingernail down the stretched-out ribbing on the bottom of Alex’s sweater. Raven is terrible at taking advice, even advice she knows is right, but she’s not an idiot. “You know what we have to do,” he tells her.

Without looking up from her computer, Raven says, “Yep.”

“Have you mentioned it to Charles yet?”

“No, but he knows,” Raven says. Her eyes flick across the screen and she frowns, types something. “I’m sure he’s taking advantage of their little jaunt to the security office to convince Alex.”

In unison, they turn to look at Sean, sacked out on the couch behind Raven. He’s breathing in little snuffling snores, his mouth open and wet. The fact that Sean graduated from Columbia with a masters in chemical engineering had been extremely surprising to Hank, since he never washes his hair and wearing almost exclusively flannel and khakis with holes in them.

“Like he’d even need persuading,” Raven says, turning back to her computer. “Any kind of experiment is exciting for Sean and his chemistry set.”

Hank doesn’t think that’s necessarily true, or even fair to Sean, but he says nothing; it’s likely that Raven needs to lash out, and better it be at someone currently unconscious than someone—like Alex—likely to hit back.

“All right, then,” Hank says as steadily as he can. He straightens and lets go of his sweater. “We can do it here. We won’t need to be fancy about it. Get to limbo as quickly as possible, without any of us getting shot. I’ll need to make some calls—Sean will need supplies, I’m sure, and Alex, too.”

“Go,” Raven says, flapping a hand at Hank. “Fly free, make your millions of phone calls. I’ll check up on where the hell Shaw’s been for the last year and a half.”

“Kicking babies?” Hank suggests as he walks out of the room, pulling his phone from the back pocket of his jeans. “Laughing at widows? Bathing in a pool full of $100 bills?”

“All likely,” Raven agrees, with an aggravated sigh. “What a fucking ass.”

~

Alex comes to find Hank a few hours later. Hank is sitting on the edge of the empty pool, having just finished a very awful phone call with Moira, trying to get his head back on straight; Alex is holding a bottle of Gatorade and taking the occasional angry swig from it. “Hey,” Hank says, looking up at Alex and smiling, involuntarily, his mouth feeling soft and stupid. He probably has a dumb expression on his face.

“Hey,” Alex says. Some of the anger melts out of his expression as he comes up behind Hank and buries his fingers in Hank’s hair. “Being a busy bee?” He tightens his grip, massaging his fingers into Hank’s scalp. It feels amazing.

“Basically,” Hank agrees. “I got Sean what he’ll need to make a serum likely to get us to limbo, and your things sent over from the warehouse in Flushing. We won’t—be able to do this, with Charles, so we’ll need a new extractor.”

“You, obviously,” Alex points out. “Steve’s a fine guy but I'm not letting him within five miles of this place.” Absently, he adds, “Security tapes were clean, going back the full year. If it _was_ an inception, we could be talking any time in the last two or three years. How would we even verify something like that?”

“In Charles’ head,” Hank replies. He leans his head back, letting his eyes fall closed, as he rests his head against Alex’s thigh. “It’s going to be terrible in there.”

“Erik’s would be worse,” Alex says, which is very true. “It’d probably have been an improvement if this had happened the other way around. Can you imagine being haunted by Charles? Politest asshole in the world.” Hank can hear the soft sounds of the Gatorade moving into the bottle, the meaty click of Alex swallowing. “There’s a lot we don’t know about Charles. This—it’s like any job. Learn his history, learn him, learn the people he knows.”

“It’s going to be weird to see Raven in this,” Hank says. “She’ll probably be one of us—or herself, maybe. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Raven just as Raven in the dreaming.”

“Raven’s just as awful everywhere,” Alex grumbles. He presses the flat of his palm against the top of Hank’s head; although Hank knows that Alex won’t view this action as a conciliatory reference to Alex’s blatant hypocrisy when it comes to being embittered and angry, Hank takes it as such. “I need to go back home to pick up some stuff. You want anything?”

“Grab my other Vaio, please,” Hank says, and he allows himself three more seconds of rest before he opens his eyes and looks straight up, into Alex’s face. The light filtering through the glass ceiling of the pool room is the warm gold of an October afternoon; all the trees on the grounds have turned gorgeous shades of yellow and red. It’s what Hank’s mother would call a good fall. Alex’s hair becomes burnished and pale under this kind of light. His mouth is a splotchy red from the Gatorade.

“Sure,” Alex says, distant for a second before he snaps back into focus. “Keep Raven from murdering Sean, will you?” He leans in at the waist to press a brief kiss to Hank’s mouth. “I left Charles in the library. He’s refiling his Hegbert book or whatever.”

“Hegel,” Hank corrects. He’s starting to get into the strange, exhilarated headspace that he always occupies right before a job; part of him wants to walk Alex back out to their car, but the majority of his mind has gotten into the rhythm of planning—he needs to talk to Sean, first, before he and Alex meet to discuss how the hell they’re even going to build this nightmare of a dream. The whole point of Limbo is to _avoid_ it, not purposely seek it out.

“Right,” Alex says. “Hogwarts.”

iv. alex

Building safely down into Limbo isn’t like building depth in any other context. Being the primordial architect, Erik had been the definition of old school, and Alex is about as far from old school that you can get without getting into fucking kindergarteners. There aren’t books to help him, just Erik’s incredibly obscure and totally useless notes, which are in _Polish_ and also basically unintelligible due to Erik’s shitty handwriting.

In probably any other context, Alex would be less of a dumb fuck and outsource this shit to somebody who’s been doing it for longer than fourteen months—Tony, maybe—but Raven is being really terrifyingly into the idea of dismembering anybody who breathes a word of the situation to somebody outside of the team.

So Alex does a lot of messing around, feeling like a failure and unable to explain it to anybody. He’s gotten used to talking through stuff with Hank, but three weeks in Hank’s started to get twitchy from having to do with both his and Charles’ usual jobs and Alex isn’t going to be the asshole that pushes Hank from sleeping only two or three hours a night to not sleeping at all.

They don’t go back to the Brooklyn apartment, which means Hank’s plants are definitely dead by the time an actual plan starts to get pulled together. The best case scenario would be if Charles were totally unaware they were going in at all, but there’s not really a chance of them outthinking a genius of Charles’ caliber. Erik was the only one who could ever beat Charles at chess, so now that they’re apparently sharing brain-space, there’s no way subterfuge is going to work out.

In the end, they keep Charles out of the particulars and that’s the best they can really hope for.

After Erik died, Alex became the most pessimistic person in the room by default; therefore, no one seems surprised when he looks up from his blueprints at four in the morning, two days before they’re set to send Charles under, and says, “This is not going to fucking work.”

“Oh my _god_ ,” Raven groans. “Seriously? Two days?”

Sean cackles and kicks his feet up onto the ottoman that looks like one of Charles’ ancestors stole it from Mongolia, down to the weird fringe. “Pay up,” he says.

“Fuck you,” Raven replies. “I don’t know where my purse is, I’ll get it for you later.”

Sourly, Alex turns to Hank and says, “What was your money on?”

“Tomorrow,” Hank admits. He blinks at Alex so slowly that Alex is worried he’s going to fall asleep partway through the motion. “Raven already knew she lost; she had last week.”

“Well, I’m glad that being the only person in this room with fucking common sense is funny,” Alex snaps, and Raven’s the only one who reacts by laughing.

Hank’s lost five pounds he couldn’t really have stood to lose; he looks like a half-hearted punch to the face would break him in half. He carefully marks his place in his planner and closes it. “Come on,” he says, mouth drawn into a serious line. “Let’s hear it.”

“This is seriously dumb shit,” Alex says, jabbing a finger into his blueprints. “I would know, okay? I am the king of dumb shit. And there’s _no way_ this is going to work. Either Charles was incepted or Erik really is in there, but either way, he knows we’re coming. Do any of you really want to go up against Erik straight on? Because I don’t. He’s fucking crazy.”

“Hey,” Sean objects, “watch your language,” and Alex rolls his eyes before grudgingly apologizing because he knows it was a dick thing to do; Sean takes not using ableist language seriously. Since Sean spends 90% of his time being basically useless and a pretty cool dude, Alex is willing to allow him this.

“Erik’s scary,” Alex modifies. “As the one who was shot in Singapore, I think I’m allowed to say that. Erik is really terrifying.”

Raven says, “I mean, I’m not _disagreeing_. But so we’re pretty clear on this, over my dead body is my brother going to think he’s got his husband’s consciousness along for a ride without us confirming what the hell is going on. If this is Shaw fucking with him, I’m going to go to Hong Kong and stab that son of a bitch with a mechanical pencil.”

“Seconded,” Hank says grimly. He pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose with an index finger as he turns to Alex, his expression melting into something open and warm, the way he looks when he nudges Alex awake in the morning with soft kisses up his jaw. Alex would kill people to keep that soft, exposed weakness in Hank. He probably will, because Hank sometimes seems like more of a walking liability than an actual person.

Alex gets Erik, probably more than anyone else, because he’s pretty sure Erik felt that same way about Charles.

“This is the best of a bad situation,” Hank tells Alex. “We can’t do nothing, and we can’t do better, really.”

“Somebody’s going to die,” Alex says. He hates being the harbinger of doom in the room, but it doesn’t look like anybody else is going to step up to do it. “That’s the kind of stupid that this plan is. Somebody is going to _die_. We’re doing the number one thing that Charles told us not to do, when we started this. You don’t fuck with Limbo.”

After a brief moment of silence, Raven says, “But it’s _Charles_.”

Back when Alex first started this, he thought this team was going to be professional. Erik, who had recruited him, was really great at appearing professional, as long as Charles wasn’t in the room. Eventually, Alex had learned that this team is the literal opposite of professional—it’s basically a family business, and Alex married into it. It’s his own damn fault that he’s here, with his back against a wall, just like it was his fault when he got caught jacking cars. Alex always walks into bad situations with both eyes open. He knows he’s a moron, at least, which is more than he can say for Hank or Raven, those idealistic little shits.

“Yeah,” Alex finally allows. What else is he going to say? “It’s Charles.”

“If we’re done with registering token complaints and future ‘I told you so’s, can I go?” Sean asks, lifting a foot off of the ottoman to crack his ankle. “I’m starved.”

As Raven shoots him a disgusted look, he shrugs and lifts and cracks the other. “Emotions make me hungry,” he says. “Can somebody give my latest shit a test drive while I’m gone? I think I cleared up the fuzziness on the first level.”

“Why don’t _you_ test it?” Raven suggests, but Sean’s already off the couch and on his way to the kitchen. Hank makes a move towards the vial on the side table next to the couch, like Alex is actually going to let him test an experimental sedative on two hours of sleep.

“Back it up,” Alex snaps, moving around Hank quickly and snagging the vial before Hank can get to it with his stupidly long limbs. “I’ll test it, you monitor. Eat something while you do it, okay? And coffee doesn’t count, because coffee isn’t fucking food.”

Hank blinks at Alex monolithically slowly and then he nods and says, “Okay, ramen for two.”

“Oh my _god_ ,” Raven breathes behind them. “Seriously? Charles is a billionaire. Our housekeeper left a ricotta and leek baked ziti, you heathens.”

The corner of Hank’s mouth twitches, which means he’s been baiting Raven. That deserves some kind of reward; Alex steps into the thin curve of Hank’s body and goes up on his toes for a long kiss, with a very filthy lip suck in the middle. He’s hoping he can fuck Hank to sleep tonight. It’s worked before.

“Ziti,” Hank agrees dazedly when Alex pulls back and goes to set up the PASIV. “Right. Okay.”

~

Two days later Raven drugs Charles’ after-dinner coffee, and after he falls asleep in the large wing-backed chair in the library, they sneak in to hook up the PASIV. Moira has come up on the afternoon Amtrak from DC to supervise things outside of the dream; Alex had left after dinner to pick her up from the Pleasantville Metro-North stop, and he comes back from a fairly awkward car ride to the rest of the team arrayed around Charles like little kids waiting for a story before bed.

Moira lets her bag fall to the floor by the door and says, dryly, “So we’re just jumping right in, are we?”

“It’s Westchester on a Sunday night, what took you so long?” Raven demands irritably. “Come on, get over here.”

The first dream is the manor on a lazy fall morning, purposely as close as possible to their current lives. Alex finds himself walking down the hall outside the library in a pair of plaid pajama pants, his shoulder holster tucked on over a zipped sweatshirt. His feet seem interested in making their way to the kitchen, so that’s where Alex goes. When he enters, Raven is at the counter, making a pot of coffee and chatting with Hank. Charles is sitting on the settee in the dining nook, sipping on a cup of tea, his feet curled up underneath him.

“Good morning, Alex,” Charles says cheerfully. “Have you seen Sean? I imagine we cannot continue without him.”

Raven shoots Charles a venomous look over the stainless steel coffeepot. “You couldn’t even pretend?” she says. “Seriously?” Even though it’s probably eight in the morning, Raven’s makeup is expertly applied and she’s wearing a matching lavender silk nightgown and bathrobe.

“No point in delaying,” Charles says breezily. The matching saucer to his teacup is resting on his left knee; he looks ridiculous, because Alex grew up in a shitty two-bedroom apartment in Albany with his parents and younger brother. Alex had been pretty sure, until he was nineteen, that people like Charles were figments of the imagination. Nobody Alex had known growing up had drunk tea, unless it was hyper-sweetened and sold out of a 7-11 fridge.

“Have you seen Erik?” Alex asks Charles, forcing himself not to fiddle with his holster.

Charles rests his teacup on the saucer and shakes his head, once, thoughtfully. “Not yet,” he says. “I imagine he’ll make his way to us whenever he finds the moment most opportune.”

“Fuck,” Alex bites out, just as Sean wanders into the kitchen in a pair of sweats and a stretched-out t-shirt that says SAVE A LIFE: DONATE BLOOD. There’s a picture underneath the words of a red drop of blood with fangs.

“Hey, morning,” he says sleepily, rubbing at his eyes with a curled fist. “Yo, Charles, I think I saw your creepy-ass husband lurking around the east wing.”

“Fuck,” Alex says, louder this time. He has a .38 in the shoulder holster and he’d made sure to have the gunroom in the west wing filled, but there’s a brutal efficiency to Erik Lehnsherr that even bullets can’t fully hamper. “He won’t stay here if you’re going deeper. Raven, the PASIV should be under the sink.”

Alex doesn’t know why he even bothered to build the whole manor, when all they’re going to see of it is the kitchen. Maybe he’d done it in case this really is Erik, in Charles’ head. Alex has a whole bucket of issues relating to authority figures, and a lot of them involve needing to please them. He knows he’s not really subtle about that, but Alex has never really been interested in pretending. People who pretend to be more than they are end up dead.

As the least experienced of them with dreaming and also the most ruthless with regards to the use of firearms, Alex stays behind as the rest of his team falls under the influence of Sean’s serum like dominos. Hank is the last to sink into it, chewing on his lip as Alex slips the needle under the thin skin at the inside curve of his elbow. “Be safe,” he tells Alex, like he’s not the one going towards fucking Limbo, where people _die_.

Sometimes, Alex is so irritated by the fact that he’s in love with Hank that he can barely see straight. It reminds him of being a hopped-up seventeen-year-old on his way to juvie just as much it does of being a very angry nineteen-year-old being tapped by Erik Lehnsherr in a deserted parking lot in Flushing to join some kind of shady government black ops program.

“Shut up,” Alex snarls. “If you die, I’ll fucking kill you.”

“I love you, too,” Hank tells him. “Don’t shoot Erik if you can help it, please.”

“I’ll shoot whoever I want,” Alex replies promptly as Hank’s eyelids begin to flutter. “Not like you’re going to remember this part anyway.”

Hank says nothing in reply, but Alex hadn’t been expecting him to. Instead, he lightly fists his hand in the front of Alex’s sweatshirt and sleepily tugs until Alex stretches down enough to kiss him on the forehead.

“Sweet dreams,” Alex says quietly, and then he immediately feels so much self-loathing that he shudders and disentangles Hank’s fingers from his sweatshirt.

“Cute,” Erik observes from the doorway.

Alex leaps about two feet into the air and draws his gun as he turns; he’s still staring down the barrel of Erik’s K100 Mk6 by the time he’s finished the rotation. “Fuck,” Alex spits. He’s always trusted that particularly blank look in Erik’s eyes, because it’d meant Erik was free enough from Charles’ influence to actually be ruthless.

Considering that Alex doesn’t want to be shot any time soon, he’d actually prefer a little bit of Charles’ influence right about now. “Well?” Alex finally demands, when the ticking of the analog clock over the settee in the breakfast nook has gotten uncomfortably loud. “Aren’t you going to follow them?”

Erik raises an eyebrow. His arm is still steady, that bastard. Alex’s triceps always start to ache after a while. It’s not actually possible to just maintain perfect shooting posture for minutes on end, no matter how effortless Erik makes it look.

“And how do you suggest I do that?” Erik asks.

Incredulous, Alex says, “I’m not the _ghost_ , how the fuck am I supposed to know that?”

Erik rolls his eyes in a quick flick, not nearly fast enough for Alex to take advantage of the distraction and disarm him. “Stop playing stupid, Alex.”

“If you’re a projection,” Alex reminds him, “you should be able to move between layers of dreaming without needing a PASIV.”

“Brilliant as always, Summers,” Erik drawls. “Please, follow through with the obvious deduction.”

“You’re—not a projection?” Alex says, still incredulous but now feeling pissy about it. “You’re _dead_.” To make his point, he points he switches his aim from Erik’s forehead to his left thigh and pulls the trigger.

There’s a half second that fills Alex with sincere elation as Erik’s face twitches with shock. He probably hadn’t expected Alex to actually shoot him. Up until thirty milliseconds ago, _Alex_ hadn’t expected Alex to shoot him.

The wood frame of the door behind Erik explodes in a puff of splinters. “See,” Alex says, totally faking his nonchalance as he lowers his gun and reengages the safety. “You’re a ghost.”

Erik says, “You’re a fucking _idiot_ ,” as his left knee collapses and he falls in an unsteady rush. His pants are black; it takes Alex a few seconds to realize that there’s actually blood gushing out of a small scrape along Erik’s thigh, where Alex had just shot him.

“Shit,” Alex says blankly. “ _Shit_ , fuck.” He jams the .38 back into his shoulder holster and skids to Erik’s side. He just shot Erik and Charles is going to find out and probably use his sinister British billionaire powers to disappear Alex to a dank basement cell somewhere in the back woods of Yugoslavia.

“Get me into the PASIV,” Erik grits out through his teeth. “It’s just a graze. Patch me up while I’m out.”

“Seriously, fuck you,” Alex tells him, slipping his hands under Erik’s arms to grip his triceps and lug him to the nearest chair. What a mess. “Why the fuck could I _do that_? What the fuck is going on?”

Erik gives Alex a very frustrated, bitchy look and says, “I need to catch them before they go to the next level—by all means, let’s stop and have a chat.”

“ _Fuck_ ,” Alex bites out as he plugs one of the extra IVs into a port on the side of the PASIV. “ _You_.” He lacks creativity in stressful situations, which is why he’d had such an extensive juvie record before the CIA got that shit redacted. “If you shoot anyone in the head, you’re never going to wake up.”

As Alex flips the switch to open the port, Eric smiles faintly. It’s his scary serial killer smile. “I doubt that’s how this is going to end.” He closes his eyes and adopts all appearances of being unconscious before Alex has the chance to say something pithy.

“What a fucking bunch of idiots,” Alex finally says, to the unconscious bodies of his dreaming family, before climbing out of his crouch and going to make himself a cup of coffee.

v. erik

Erik finds Charles in Limbo, standing on the shore of a beach that looks a little bit like the northern coast of Cuba, if Erik squints and ignores the destroyed skyscrapers framing an abandoned city a mile out to sea.

“Hello,” Charles says quietly, when Erik is close enough to see the sweat-dampened hair resting against the back of his neck. He’s facing out over the waves, west of the abandoned city to where the horizon stretches out like the sky of a Pissarro painting.

“Charles,” Erik replies, coming to stand next to him. Charles is wearing a slightly rumpled button-down underneath a cardigan gone baggy at the elbows. In a short-sleeved polo, Erik is perfectly dressed for an early Cuba morning; Charles must be strangled under all of those layers.

British to the last, Charles; like his ancestors, Charles does not admit defeat to a foreign clime he is intent on conquering. Erik had thought he would hate that, about Charles—the parts of him that were so clearly the product of years of impeccable breeding to produce generations of pristine, pasty colonialists—but even those, the things that he hates and does not understand, are dear to him, now.

“It’s a lovely morning,” Charles says. He removes his left hand from his pocket and, without looking, grasps the hem of Erik’s polo and tugs him a step closer. The metal of his wedding ring looks dull and brassy under Erik’s shadow.

“Well enough, for Cuba,” Erik says. He allows Charles to move him so their shoulders are touching, the soft wool of Charles’ cardigan pressing against Erik’s arm. “Have you gone in yet?”

“No,” Charles says. “I was waiting for you.”

Erik is glad that Charles is still staring out over the sea; his eyes can be particularly devastating, when he wields them to his advantage. “No point in waiting,” he points out, but when Charles doesn’t move he widens his stance, bracing himself against the slow tug of the ocean rolling in at their feet. Charles has an internal sense of timing that makes him an impeccable extractor and a hugely frustrating person with whom to play chess. He cannot be moved for anything except his own sense of correctness.

At some indeterminate point of time later, when the sun has inched slightly higher, Charles sighs and bends down to take off his shoes and roll up the legs of his trousers. Erik removes his shoes but doesn’t bother with his pants; the waves are forceful enough that he’ll be soaked to the knee, regardless.

“Shall we?” Charles asks, looking up at Erik from where he is crouched. The wind chooses then to ruffle through his hair, sending the curling length of his fringe across his eyes. He looks disgustingly boyish for someone of his age; he looks like he had during their honeymoon, six or seven or ten or twenty years ago, pulling Erik into the Mediterranean. “Not quite Antalya, I’m afraid,” Charles continues, apparently effortlessly pulling Erik’s thoughts from his head.

“Fewer tourists,” Erik agrees, and he can’t help a quick grin at Charles’ shout of laughter.

“Who needs Hadrian’s Gate with so much to see here?” Charles asks dryly. He rises to his feet and reaches for Erik’s hand. “Please humor an old man.”

Charles is not old, not yet—soon? Maybe—but Erik accepts the offered palm, lets Charles align and interlace their fingers. He had not been fond of very public displays of affection, but he has always understood their utility in private. When he holds hands with Charles, it reminds him of the many parts of their married life that he had valued—although perhaps not enough—during his living days. Pinning Charles to their bed; delivering his king to Charles in defeat; accepting Charles’ king in moments of victory; handing Charles a cup of tea after dinner; showing Charles easily twelve times how to replace a spare tire and still, like clockwork every few months, having to show him again.

“No humor necessary,” Erik tells him. Hand in hand, they walk into the waves. The stretch of water between them and the drowned city looks interminable, but they have plenty of time and no likelihood of wearying themselves.

It takes Charles a long time to speak, which surprises Erik greatly. Shutting Charles up had been the greatest challenge of their married life.

“I suppose,” Charles finally says quietly, “that I am very afraid, my love.”

Erik’s fingers tighten their grip, against his will. He doesn’t have a body anymore, but the spike of adrenaline that races through him is an achingly familiar echo of that other life. “Of what?” he asks.

“I know you are really dead,” Charles says. His eyes have been fixed on the city before them but he turns them now, looking up at Erik. The water is warm and smells of fish and brine; Charles’ trousers are soaked and clinging to his calves. “I’ve not lost all of my capacity for rational thought. I do not fear that, at least.”

Erik says, “Why.”

Nodding, Charles lets his next step take him closer to Erik, brushing his knuckles against Erik’s thigh. “Precisely. The why is terrifying.”

Is the city closer? It must be, as they’ve been walking for some time, but Erik can’t tell. His architect’s brain has atrophied from lack of use. He’s only truly conscious in this state when he’s interacting with Charles. Where does he go when Charles is not dreaming? He would almost call it a sleep.

The truth of it catches against the back of Erik’s throat; the air over the water is so salty that it almost tastes like blood, coppery and thin. “I think you know the why,” Erik tells him.

Stubborn, stubborn man that he is, Charles says, “I’d prefer not to guess, without at least some evidence,” and his lips thin. He’s not interested in continuing this conversation, then, which is too bad. They have half an ocean to cross and Erik doesn’t have anything better to do.

“You have all the evidence you need,” Erik points out. He can play Charles’ foil now in his sleep, which enables him to devote most of his energy to sense memory: Charles’ skin, Charles’ smell, the color of each individual strand of Charles’ hair.

They weren’t married nearly long enough, Erik thinks. Four lifetimes wouldn’t have been enough, even for someone who had been raised like Erik, to prioritize things that gave him pleasure and value them for their inherent brevity. He would have liked to grow old and wizened at Charles’ side. The immortality of a young death had only been important to Erik when he was at his most callow.

Charles hums in the back of his throat. “I think not, my love.”

The city comes to them, eventually, rising out of the sand like it is tired of waiting for them. Erik hasn’t been to their ruined city since he and Charles were last here, together, and he’s not surprised that it has become even more run-down in the interim. Bricks have fallen out of walls and tumbled into piles on street corners; there are weeds between the cracks of the sidewalk.

It’s still a pristine city; there are no signs of human life. No one has painting graffiti on blank walls or left paper bags and aluminum cans to pile up in alleyways. There are no shrieks of cats, no screaming babies, no pounding bass. The paint has rubbed off of the streets, leaving behind no discernible road rules, but there are no cars.

Charles pauses to unroll his trousers and let them dry; Erik stands under a streetlight, toeing back into his shoes, and attempts to discern if it still works. The sun is still overhead, still a sick, buttery yellow; if the streetlights don’t work, Erik will never be able to tell.

“Come on,” Charles says once he’s done fiddling with his trousers and has put his socks and shoes back on. “Do you remember the way?” Erik wants to fit his mouth around the distended knobs of Charles’ ankles, an impulse so pure and sudden that he almost trips and knocks his head against the streetlight.

“Well enough,” Erik says, but he takes Charles’ hand when offered and does not object when Charles leads them towards the house. He does not entirely trust himself; he would get them lost in half a millisecond, if it meant more time with Charles. He knows, when he is not being selfish, that this has gone on long enough and needs to stop. It’s just terribly difficult not to be selfish.

Maybe Charles knows that, because he takes them the long way around. They cut through a small neighborhood of cobbled streets, narrow and covered in ivy, where all of the doors are painted bright colors. They had stayed just off of a piazza in such a neighborhood, when they were in Sardinia.

_We can never take Raven here_ , Charles had said into Erik’s neck as they took a lazy afternoon nap, the doors to their narrow Mediterranean balcony thrown open. _She’d insist I paint all the doors in the manor like this_.

_Here’s an idea_ , Erik had grumbled back. _Let’s not talk about your sister while we’re in bed on our wedding trip_.

When the cobblestones end, they melt into a respectably bricked-over road, red and impeccably sealed. The third house on the brick road is theirs. It isn’t as decayed as the rest of the street, but that makes it look almost worst.

“Home,” says Charles, rocking back onto his heels. He looks loathe to enter, now that they’ve come this far, and Erik knows that it is up to him, to do this.

“Are you going to go in?” he asks. “Or just stand here in the street for twenty years, waiting for an invitation?”

“You sound like Alex,” Charles says repressively. “Fine. In we go.” He takes a deep breath and drops Erik’s hand to stride forward. Charles would have made a very good lord of some ancient pile of sandstone, had he been born a few centuries earlier. “Are you coming?” he throws over his shoulder, raising a hand to the latch of the door.

“Yes,” Erik says, and he manages to dry the wretchedness out of his tone by virtue of making his voice sound like nothing at all. “I’m right behind you, Charles.”

Being in Limbo makes the rest of the world look like it’s been encased in amber. They’d made their way straight to the house because it made sense, in light of the urgency of their mission, but Erik realizes, as Charles depresses the latch of the door and pushes it open, that he could have taken more time: he could have taken another lifetime, in their wrecked city. It would have been over in a blink, with none outside of his marriage left the wiser.

Erik has never been a particularly good thief. He’s too self-aware. One lifetime hadn’t been enough, so why on earth would two?

“What is this?” Charles asks. He’s standing in the middle of the front room; Erik can see him framed perfectly in the doorway, even from the street. “Erik—what the _bloody hell_ is this?”

“No small degree of irony, I would think,” Erik says. His lips are numb. He puts his hands in his pockets, because he can’t hold Charles with them anymore.

Charles’ shoulders are trembling. “Oh no,” he whispers. “Oh, _no_.”

“We had a good run of it, I think,” Erik says. “Quite a year. Singapore was particularly beautiful.”

Charles says, “Erik, shut up.” He’s beginning to sound furious.

“This is going to sound appallingly maudlin,” Erik continues, “but I’m afraid I’m going to have to say it. You need to let go.” He can’t help the reflexive bark of laughter. “Good god, I’ve become Hank McCoy.”

Slowly, as if he’s become frail, Charles turns back to Erik. He’s holding the helmet between his palms, with the neck of it open up towards himself. From where he’s standing, Eric can’t see the Hegel inside, but he knows it’s there. He and the book are siblings of sorts; the same person put both the Hegel inside the helmet and Erik here, in these dreams.

“What the _hell_ is this?” Charles shouts, and he throws the helmet at Erik. Years of public school and cricket have given him an appallingly good arm; Erik has to duck out of the way. “Is this—did you do this? For God’s sake, Erik, was it—Shaw?”

He sounds desperate, because he knows he’s being deliberately obtuse.

“No,” Erik says.

“No,” Charles echoes; it becomes less of an answer in his mouth, become simultaneously a question and an expression of horror. “ _No_.”

“Dishonesty doesn’t suit you,” Erik points out. “Which is why your house of cards wasn’t sustainable.”

“I—I did this to _you_ ,” Charles says. He’s remembering Erik’s suicide now, probably, because there’s a burning in his eyes—it’s the kind of fury that comes from a deep, unfathomable pain. Erik can recognize it easily, from years of looking in a mirror. He’d been motivated by nothing but pain and rage, until he’d met Charles.

“Charles Xavier, the greatest living extractor,” Erik says. “The first of our profession to perform an inception and to do it so expertly that you actually incepted two minds. _You_ might’ve escaped if you hadn’t been so guilty, Charles. Felled by your own morals, like always.”

“I was so bloody sure it was really you,” Charles mutters. He’s begun to cry. “It didn’t—make sense. The stupid book. Your dressing gown.”

“Do you remember what I told you in Volgograd? Our first field operation for SpecOps?” Erik asks. “Men will always believe what they want to believe. You cannot change a man’s mind unless he is willing to do it himself. I was unwilling, Charles. What happened to me was unavoidable. _You_ , however, lacked the ruthlessness to protect yourself. You always have, you idiot.”

Charles has never been attractive while crying; he turns splotchy, like every other resident of his blasted homeland. Nonetheless, Erik wants to kiss him so badly that his bones ache with it.

Charles says, “I am deeply sorry for what I did to you, my love.” Erik has no trouble believing him.

“You did the right thing,” Erik says. “You simply lacked conviction. Perhaps that will always be your greatest weakness.”

“No,” Charles says, “no, I think you were right about the ruthlessness. Conviction is something I have in spades.” His voice is wet but he’s staring right at Erik, at his face, as though he is memorizing it. “I’m afraid I love you very much still, Erik.”

Erik shoots him before his own faulty conviction can become a problem.

vi. darwin

There is a man waiting outside of the classroom where Darwin has Advanced Building Structures II twice a week. The class empties out around him, pouring out drowsily into the May sunshine. As Darwin makes to do the same, he says, “Mr. Muñoz?”

His accent is crisp, British, and as unfamiliar to Darwin as the light Virginia drawl had been when he’d started at VT two years ago. “Yes?” Darwin says.

“Hello,” the man replies brightly, offering his hand. Darwin shakes it, since he wouldn’t put it past Dr. Howlett to recommend that a potential mentor ambush Darwin after class. It’s the kind of thing that asshole would do. “My name is Charles Xavier. I am a friend of Logan Howlett.”

Of course he is. “Nice to meet you,” Darwin says. Xavier has a firm grip, for all that he’s soft and smiling. “Are you also an architect?” He hasn’t heard of any of his work, but Darwin’s only a second year. He has a while to learn the name of every firm in the U.S.

“Not quite,” Xavier says. “However, I’ve heard that you have the makings of a rather remarkable one. Are you available to talk right now? I’m actually here about a somewhat unique opportunity.”

“Um,” says Darwin, and then he reminds himself that, strange vibes from the guy or not, internships don’t grow on fucking trees. “Yeah! Absolutely.”

Beaming, Xavier says, “Wonderful! Let’s have some tea, and you can tell me what you know about labyrinths.”


End file.
